On a visit to the Welsh Slate Museum, Llanberis, today (27 May 2005), the First Minister for Wales, Rhodri Morgan, stated his pride in the news of the success of the Big Pit Mining Museum - another of the National Museums & Galleries of Wales' family of museums - in this year's Gulbenkian Prize.

Big Pit: National Mining Museum of Wales is tonight (26 May) celebrating its success in winning this year's prestigious Gulbenkian prize for Museum of the Year, having beaten off stiff competition to win the £100,000 arts prize.

Work begins next week on dismantling a sugar pink and baby blue hairdressing salon and adjacent barbers from Aberdare, south Wales to the Museum of Welsh Life. A beautiful snapshot of women's lives, style and growing independence on the cusp of the 1960s, the salon has been empty for decades on a once bustling shopping street but will now be conserved and re-erected alongside the world famous buildings at St Fagans.

Big Pit celebrates VE Day by launching its appeal for Bevin Boys to get in touch. Were you a Bevin Boy, or were any men in your family Bevin Boys? Did you fall in love with a Bevin Boy? If so, we want to hear from you.

The Welsh Slate Museum Llanberis hosts a series of special talks this month, focusing on the role played by the slate industry in people's daily lives. Diverse topics, ranging from the industry's relationship with seafaring to the kind of produce grown by quarrymen in their gardens, are intended to have a broad and popular appeal to visitors to the Museum.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) one of the leading members of the Impressionist group, had a keen interest in gardening, as his later works clearly show. His garden at Giverny has long been admired by art lovers and gardeners alike, and works such as his delicate paintings of the Waterlilies became some of the most famous paintings in the world.